Rochelle Riley: High court only deals with one side of race issue in admissions ruling

11:47 AM, April 23, 2014

Students walk through the campus of the University of Michigan Tuesday. The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday upheld Michigan's ban on affirmative action enacted by voters in 2006. / Ryan Garza / Detroit Free Press

Two things were clear from Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a ban on using race, even in part, to decide admissions into Michigan’s public universities.

First, the court did not outlaw affirmative action; it just affirmed that state officials are fully capable of deciding whether they want to be viewed as racist and whether they want their colleges to be diverse.

“Were the Court to rule that the question addressed by Michigan voters is too sensitive or complex to be within the grasp of the electorate; or that the policies at issue remain too delicate to be resolved save by university officials or faculties, acting at some remove from immediate public scrutiny and control; or that these matters are so arcane that the electorate’s power must be limited because the people cannot prudently exercise that power even after a full debate, that holding would be an unprecedented restriction on the exercise of a fundamental right held not just by one person but by all in common,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “It is the right to speak and debate and learn and then, as a matter of political will, to act through a lawful electoral process.”

Whether Michigan legislators can debate and learn through this process is to be determined, but Gov. Rick Snyder immediately pledged to uphold the law without saying whether relentless powerful action to return Michigan to the past would hurt the state’s future.

Second, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette apparently isn’t clear on all the ways the University of Michigan admits students. Schuette could not be reached for comment.

"Attorney General Schuette’s job is to defend the Constitution. In this situation, he is not tasked with designing individual admissions policies," his spokeswoman, Joy Yearout, said late Tuesday. "That being said, according to the law and today’s ruling, universities should abandon any policies that are racially discriminatory. Under the Michigan Constitution, it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, gender or ethnicity." The AG did not say whether he plans to pursue legal remedy to end legacy admissions.

The court, as it has in previous cases, dealt only with admissions of minority students. What it did not do — and has not been forced to do — is deal with how some white students are admitted.

The U of M has not been challenged for saving seats for white students because their parents attended or because their families have given money, legacy practices that remain from a time when black students could not attend the U of M. Ah, the subtle ways that race still can be used in a state whose attorney general preaches that using race is wrong.

Poor Jennifer Gratz, the plaintiff in Gratz v. Bollinger, the landmark case that began the state’s slow slide away from diversity. She calls such decisions progress, but still doesn’t realize after all these years that her skin color still might not have gotten her admitted to the U of M. There were plenty of less than stellar white students pushed ahead of her by special policies that indirectly deal with race.

Some critics said the court’s decision was a step backward for racial inclusion.

That’s wrong, too, because some minority students outrank the Jennifer Gratzes of the world in grades and intellect.

So what Michigan and other states have to decide is: If you have students with less than a 4.0 grade point average and the ability to matriculate at your universities, do you want all of those students to be white, do you deliberately pull from different ethnic backgrounds to ensure diversity, or do you put them all in a hat and draw names in hopes of achieving some kind of 21st-Century diversity?

Oh, there is one other decision you have to make: What kind of workforce, what kind of future population, are you developing when you cannot consider diversity?

No black child should demand admission to a college because of skin color, as Brooke Kimbrough did. She’s the University Prep graduate who protested being denied admission by carrying a sign and urging U of M to make its population mirror that of the state.

But no white child should assume admission because of skin color, as many do — and as Jennifer Gratz did.

I always wondered which student Gratz thought took her place and whether she ever realized she never had a guaranteed place at the U of M and that some of the very students whose grades she questioned shared her skin color.